Blacks have a great respect for age, and the sickness of Wuntoo caused great sorrow. A solemn gathering of all the men was called. Arrkroo was there and so was Stobart, for the white captive did not want to arouse suspicion or unfriendly feelings by staying away. The sickness of Wuntoo was, of course, attributed to magic; some enemy of the old man had boned him. It was, therefore, the duty of the gathering to find out and to punish the man who had done this, whether he was a member of their own tribe or whether he lived several hundred miles away.

Arrkroo was the only man present who really knew what ailed Wuntoo, for he himself had put poison in the old man's food--the juice of a narrow-leafed vine which grew only in the Valley of the Skulls. He had used this same poison to kill every prospector who had found the golden-sanded pool. After a lot of talk, which got more and more excited and incoherent as the meeting went on, Stobart volunteered to go and see the sick man. He knew that the natives would only sing over the invalid, or give him sand to eat, or practise a repulsive and harmful magic upon him, and he thought that perhaps some simple treatment might make him right again. Stobart had gained influence over the minds of the tribesmen, and was allowed to go. This was just what Arrkroo had hoped for.

Next day Wuntoo was worse, due to another dose of the poison which the crafty Arrkroo had administered. A second meeting was called. The old man was dying. Arrkroo arrived with freshly painted body and new feathers in his hair, and addressed the men with all the powers at his command. He felt that, if he failed to defeat the white man this time, his authority in the tribe would be gone for ever. He danced before his listeners, lifting his striped legs high, and swaying his body this way and that till the designs in white and red hypnotized the natives and held them spell-bound.

Even Stobart felt the evil power of the man. When he had got their minds under his control, he chanted to them of the great days of the Alcheringa when they were a powerful fair-skinned race of giants, and had everything that their hearts could desire. He went on to tell of one misfortune after another which had befallen them: their bodies had grown small, their skins black, and droughts had changed the earth from a garden into a desert. The warraguls listened, swaying their bodies as Arrkroo swayed his, and breaking out at times in wild shouts of agreement. Arrkroo was an orator in his primitive way, and he now had his audience completely at his command. He could do what he liked with it.

He began to talk of white men: of the way in which they had invaded the country and driven the natives back and back till now a mere handful of them survived in such places as the Musgrave Ranges. But the hated white men were never satisfied. They wanted the Musgraves too. They wanted the gold which was there. Everybody present knew the fate of the white prospectors, and that if once the secret was known, such a rush would set in that the warraguls would be driven out of this, their last great stronghold.

Arrkroo turned towards Stobart. Every man in the gathering looked at him also. "See," shouted the Hater in the native tongue. "See. White man. He find gold. His tracks all around Pool of Skulls. He want run away. He come back soon. Nintha (one), thama (two), urapitcha (three), therankathera (four)--many, many more. Kill black-fellow.

Kill black-fellow. Kill black-fellow."

He stopped speaking and stretched out his painted arm towards the drover. The warraguls leapt to their feet, their eyes blazing, and their bodies ready to spring upon the white man. Stobart got up from the ground very slowly and faced his enemies, staring steadily at them.

His hour had come. He would face death without flinching.

The blacks paused. Arrkroo feared that even now the white man would escape by the tremendous power of his dauntless eye. So he started to speak again, very excitedly.

"He bone Wuntoo. He burn bone, make death sure. You all see him burn bone. He go in last night, make him worse. You see him go in last night. Wuntoo die. You all die. You all die. You all die."

He had succeeded. A roar of fear and hatred went up from the a.s.sembly.

Every man goaded his neighbour to be the first to spring upon the defenceless captive. Arrkroo's heart was glad. He started to dance again, but this time it was the Dance of Death. Stobart knew that he was a doomed man, but not a muscle of his face altered. The crowd of frenzied warraguls, eager to pull him limb from limb, leaned forward, but he still held them with his fearless eye. How long would it last?

Arrkroo danced nearer and nearer. When one of those whirling arms of his touched the victim, the spell would be broken, and Boss Stobart, the bravest drover of Central Australia, would go down before the onslaught of a hundred yelling fiends.

Arrkroo's spinning and swaying body came nearer and nearer. There was tense stillness. Men held their breath. Stobart faced the future as he had always faced every difficulty--with clear open-eyed courage.

Arrkroo's hand pa.s.sed his face so closely that he felt the wind of it.

The next time it would touch him.

Stobart did not move, but every muscle of his powerful body gathered itself for the supremest effort of his life. The head of the Hater swayed towards him, back, and then forward again. Then Stobart acted!

Like a flash his fist shot out. His body was like a spring suddenly released. The weight of every ounce of him, the force of every nerve and sinew, and all the gathered knowledge of years went into that terrific blow. It caught Arrkroo on the point of the chin. There was a sickening click. The man's head went back like the lid of a box. He fell to the ground, quivered for a moment, and then lay still.

It all happened in the time taken to blink twice.

The crowd surged back. A gasp of astonishment went up. In a couple of seconds Stobart was alone with his fallen enemy. The man was gasping.

If Stobart had not been weakened by the life and food of the blacks'

camp, that blow would have killed Arrkroo, although the neck of a native is as strong as the neck of a bull. The drover stood looking down at the grotesquely painted figure huddled up on the ground at his feet. It began to twitch. The eyes rolled round and then fixed their gaze on Stobart. Strength returned quickly to the native and he staggered to his feet. For a moment he faced the white man, swaying unsteadily, then he turned and went away to his wurley, leaving the drover victor on the field where he had so nearly met his death.

CHAPTER XXVIII

Conclusion

That night Yarloo returned to camp. The sky was so thickly covered with stars that it looked as if powdered silver had been dusted over a tremendous and very dark blue dome. Stobart was fast asleep at the entrance to his cave when Yarloo crept up noiselessly and touched him.

He was awake and alert in a moment. The boy's head showed up dark against the stars and the white man recognized him at once.

"Me come back, Misser Stobart," whispered Yarloo.

"Good boy," replied the drover. "Good boy. Does the camp know you're here?"

"Neh. Me come longa you first time. They all about sleep."

Then Yarloo told all that he had done since he went away. Stobart was overjoyed to hear that his son was safe, and hope, which had burnt down very low recently, once more flamed up brightly in his heart. Yarloo had hurried out from Sidcotinga Station, and was too exhausted to undertake the return trip immediately or they would have escaped that very night. They decided to wait for a day or two.

In this they made a great mistake. If Stobart had disappeared that night, while every native in the camp was overawed by his victory over the powerful Arrkroo, he would probably have got clean away, but as it was, he found himself more of a prisoner than ever next morning.

Yarloo's return aroused suspicion. Every native in the tribe was afraid of the white man and n.o.body dared to kill him. Yet they were all perfectly convinced that he was the cause of Wuntoo's illness. If Wuntoo died without the others taking full vengeance on the one who had bewitched him, the old man's spirit would haunt the camp and bring terrible disaster upon it. Therefore, if Wuntoo died, Stobart must die too. So the white man was kept a close prisoner, and was even obliged to keep inside his cave. No one had sufficient courage to harm him, though all their former admiration for him was turned to fear and hatred; but, by sheer force of numbers, they made it impossible for him to escape.

One night Wuntoo was evidently dying. All the men of the tribe who were not actually guarding the prisoner were sitting in a circle with the women, making noisy lamentation. They beat their naked thighs with their open palms, and mournful chants rose from low weird mutterings to high shrill screams as they tried to frighten the evil spirits out of the dying man. A big fire was blazing and sending sparks and smoke high into the darkness, and lightening up the excited faces of the men and women all around.

Suddenly in the middle of the wildest demonstration of grief Coiloo appeared--Coiloo, whom Stobart had saved from death, and whom Mick had treated with such cruelty. He was in a shocking state. The brand-marks had started to fester, and there were burns all over his body. He had come at a critical time. The wailing warraguls looked at his wounds and their excitement got more and more intense. They vowed terrible vengeance against the white man who had done this; against all white men; against Stobart who was at their mercy. If Coiloo himself had not prevented them they would have rushed off immediately to the cave and carried out their designs while the heat of the moment gave them courage. He craftily pointed out that it was far better to kill the white man to appease the spirit of the dead Wuntoo than to kill him before the old man died. The savages listened, hesitated, and then agreed, and returned to the interrupted ceremony of mourning. And all this time the emaciated figure of Wuntoo lay out flat on the sand, lit weirdly by the leaping flames, his chest rising and falling with great effort, and his eyes rolling round with pain.

In the middle of all this excitement Yarloo escaped. He realized that he could do no good for his master by staying in the blacks' camp; so when he gathered from the excited shouts that three white men and some horses were camped out on the plains not far away, he slipped out in the darkness and made the fastest journey of his life. He arrived at Mick's camp in the early morning of the next day, just as the working horses were being driven in. He told his tale. Mick and the boys listened attentively. The drover had trusted Yarloo from the very first day he had engaged him, and he had never had cause to regret it.

So, after making sure of all the necessary facts of the case, he responded to the boy's appeal for help immediately and fully.

He cut two thick slabs of damper, put a chunk of meat between them, and handed it to Yarloo. "Here, get that inside you, me son," he said heartily. "Eat all you want. There's lots more where that came from."

The whites had already had their breakfast, and Mick at once set about packing the gear, muttering: "If I don't let daylight through half a dozen of those devils, I'll call meself a Chow, I will, straight. Now, you boys, look alive," he shouted to the blacks who were crowding round Yarloo. "You can yabber all you want when we've rounded up that tribe of black cleanskins."

The native stockmen laughed. Everybody was eager for the task. The boys were all from a sand-hill tribe who bitterly hated the wild warraguls from the mountains, and they were overjoyed at the thought of fighting on the same side as white men. Sax and Vaughan were more serious but none the less eager, especially Sax, who would have willingly gone out alone against the whole tribe, if only it would have been a help to his father.

They did not take the whole plant with them. Each man of the advance party had two good saddle-horses; there was one all ready saddled and bridled for Boss Stobart; and a swift pack-horse, lightly loaded, carried all the tucker and water they would need. There were Mick and the two white boys, Yarloo, Poona, Calcoo, and Jack Johnson, all mounted on the best horses in the plant. They had only two firearms for all the party: Mick's rifle which he carried, and his revolver, which he gave to Vaughan. Their chief weapon was "bluff", for a party of seven could do nothing against nearly a hundred armed natives, except surprise them long enough to let their prisoner escape.

They rode hard till about two o'clock, stopped and took a hunk of damper and meat each and a drink of water, and then put their saddles on fresh horses and pushed on. The sun was still an hour high when they came to a thick clump of timber at the entrance to a gully running, up into the mountains. Yarloo, who was the real leader of the party, advised that the horses be left here. The camp was not far off, and the approach to it was quite free from any cover for a mounted man.

So they hitched their horses to separate trees in such a way that they could be unfastened in the shortest possible time.

They walked stealthily through the timber to the side of the valley, where they began to crawl from boulder to boulder. It was slow work.

They dared not wait till dark. Each moment might decide the fate of the man they had come to rescue. For half a mile they approached the camp in this way, noiselessly, and completely hidden by the rocks.

They saw no sign of natives.

All at once a thin, high, quavering sound rose just ahead of them.

Others joined it like a pack of dingoes howling in the night. Then the note trembled and came down, getting louder as it descended the scale till it was a deep muttering of great anguish. It started again and again. Every native of the little party shivered. It was a death-wail.

Yarloo turned to Mick, and said hoa.r.s.ely: "Old man bin die. We hurry, I think."

The rescuers sprang to their feet and ran, stooping low and keeping out of sight. They need not have taken these precautions. Every warragul of the tribe was engaged at the camp, where death-wails rose and fell.

Suddenly a Musgrave native confronted the rescue party. He lifted his left hand and signed to them to stop. There were only two fingers and a thumb on that hand. It was Coiloo. He was armed with spears and boomerangs and a shield. Mick raised his rifle, but Yarloo leaped in front of it. A shot at this time would warn the camp and spoil any chance of success. It was more important to rescue Stobart than to settle a private quarrel.

Coiloo cast a look of deadly hatred towards Mick. He longed to hurl one of these slender spears of his at his enemy, and bury the poisonous head deep in the white man's heart. But he too had a more important task to perform just then. He grabbed Sax by the wrist and sprang up the valley with incredible swiftness. The startled white boy was carried along and quickly outdistanced the others. Coiloo gave no explanation of his strange behaviour. He must reach the blacks' camp as soon as possible. The wailing became louder and louder, and presently Sax heard a sound which gave such fleetness to his limbs that his wiry companion could hardly keep up with him. It was a booming voice which rose above the turmoil of native cries like a strong swimmer battling with the waves.

It was a white man's voice.

Sax recognized it as his father's.

Suddenly the camp burst into view. The lad would have dashed across the open s.p.a.ce at once, but Coiloo pulled him behind a rock. A terrible tragedy was about to be enacted in front of that cl.u.s.ter of sordid wurlies. The dead body of Wuntoo lay out naked on the sand. At the head of it stood Stobart, bound hand and foot, and clad in nothing but his tattered trousers. He was about to die. He knew it well, but held his head proudly and looked round at the yelling fiends with great scorn. From time to time his strong voice boomed defiance at his enemies. All around, dancing in almost delirious excitement, were the warragul men, while an outer ring was formed by the women, who kept time with their hands to the chanting which was gradually working their men up to a state of frenzy. Chief figure of all was Arrkroo, once more restored to authority, and about to have his revenge upon his rival. He strode up and down in front of the victim, armed with a huge carved and painted club.

Sax struggled in Coiloo's detaining grasp. He was but a lad, and the odds were a hundred savages against one white boy, but he wanted to leap across the intervening s.p.a.ce and stand beside his father.

Coiloo's hand was at Sax's neck. He unfastened the string of the luringa and stood up, still hidden from sight. Slowly he whirled the thin slab of wood round his head, hitting it on the ground once or twice to make it spin. The thing gave out a droning sound. The crowd of yelling fiends around the corpse became suddenly quiet. The droning increased to a loud humming. Every eye was turned.